Yield to the Amazon Women 1968

Mort Künstler painted “Yield to the Amazon Women” with oils, I’m guessing sometime in the mid-20th century. Look at how the paint is so smoothly applied; you can hardly see the brushstrokes. It's like he's trying to disappear, as if the image just materialized. There's something about the way he renders flesh, all those warm, brown, red tones. Künstler’s women are idealized. They don’t look like they are made of paint at all. He has clearly spent a lot of time on the male figure, but the women are the focus, and I wonder why. Take for instance the figure at the front, she has a determined, forward gaze. The artist seems to have spent more time rendering this figure than any other in the piece. This reminds me a little of N.C. Wyeth, with his dramatic flair and focus on storytelling. But Künstler is doing something different, the image embraces ambiguity, leaving us to fill in the gaps.